U.S. Border Patrol agents raided a humanitarian aid station in the Arizona desert late last month, taking three people into custody and breaking into a trailer without a warrant.

Video taken by No More Deaths, a faith-based aid group out of Tucson that operates the site, shows agents with flashlights prying open a trailer door and entering the structure. The camp, located just miles from the U.S.–Mexico border, has long been used to provide medical care to migrants crossing one of the world’s deadliest stretches of desert.

Monica Ruiz House, a No More Deaths volunteer who’d recently been involved in deportation defense work in Chicago, said the warrantless raid spoke to a rising culture of lawlessness among the Trump administration’s front-line immigration enforcement agencies.

“There’s this frightening pattern of impunity that’s happening across the country,” Ruiz House told The Intercept, “whether it’s Border Patrol, whether it’s ICE agents,” referring to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The November raid marks the third time in recent years that Border Patrol agents acting under the authority of President Donald Trump have targeted the remote Arizona site, and the first case in which the agency has entered a structure at the location without a warrant.

According to volunteers, Border Patrol agents claimed they were in “hot pursuit” when they broke into the group’s trailer. Hot pursuit has a particular legal meaning and typically applies in cases where law enforcement attempts to make an arrest, a subject flees into a private space, the opportunity to obtain a warrant is not available, and the risk of further of escape, destruction of evidence, or harm to others is high.

Amy Knight, an attorney who has represented No More Deaths volunteers in the past and is currently providing informal legal advice to the group, said there is no evidence that any of those factors were present in the November raid.

By all appearances, Border Patrol tracked a group of people to an aid camp but made no attempt to arrest them en route. “They were inside of a building on private property, and the........

© The Intercept